In modern society, people communicate with each other in numerous ways. Most communication savvy users often use email and instant messaging to supplement their telephone based communications, which may take place using their mobile, office, and home telephones. Although many users have a place to store contact information for the people with whom they communicate, the contact information is often not kept up-to-date and complete. Further, the contact information for different types of communications is kept in different places. For example, a user may store telephone numbers in their mobile telephone and store email addresses for the same or different contacts in their email program.
Even when contact information is kept complete and in one convenient place, keeping the information up-to-date remains a challenge, as the list of people with whom a user communicates changes over time. As relationships, work projects, and the like change, new people are added to the contact list and the people with whom the user most often communicates changes. As such, the user is faced with an ever growing contact list and the recurring task of finding the contact information for those contacts that are most used at any given time.
Although the people with whom a user often communicates changes over time, the user will communicate most often with a limited group of people at any given time. As such, the contact information for this limited group of people is more relevant than the contact information for others. However, the user must search through the contact information for all of their contacts to obtain the contact information for someone in the limited group of people. Accordingly, there is a need for a technique to aid a user in identifying the people with whom the user most often communicates and accessing contact information for those people. There is a further need to provide the user ready access to the various types of contact information for those people with whom the user most often communicates.